Call the state highway department and ask who does the landscaping and call them. If you are persistent, you will eventually find someone who knows. I was thinking maybe Knockout, but they bloom all summer.

Maybe you could get a photograph of them and post it in the Rose ID forum. Just be careful in the California traffic though.

Could it be Carefree Beauty? What color are they?

In Nocal, in some locations, I think they've used some of the "Town & Country" roses.
I have seen Cecile Brunner used, believe it or not, and both the white and yellow double banksiaes.
One year, Caltrans bought every White Lady Banks Otto & Sons had in stock. (I've seen the banksiaes used in AZ and TX, as well.

Jeri

I will do that, contact Caltrans. A moment of serendipity reminds me that their offices must be just up the road in Baton Rouge Sacramento. :)

There are lots of whites, pinks, and reds. Big huge sprawling bushes. Near Vallejo, on the way to Napa, there's an unknown white one--growing alongside a drainage ditch--that is most literally bigger than a house, maybe two houses. (note to self, stop and check it out)

Knockout or Carefree Beauty? No, that much much I know, these are not remontant roses at all. These would be ramblers or species roses.

The way they survive adjacent to blistering concrete and asphalt coupled with months of no rainfall at all is just simply amazing and very gratifying.

This afternoon, coming back from Berkeley, I spied a wonderful, vivid, yellow single just this side of Fairfield. At first I thought it was a mass of California daisies but quickly realized that those bloom nearly perpetually and have been full for sometime I was moving at freeway speed but got just enough of a second glimpse to realize they were roses.

Thanks for sharing your experience. California is doing something right, actually has been doing a lot of things right for some years, beautiful sights out there.

We used to live in Petaluma and use that freeway often near Napa. How I would have loved to see those roses, nothing like that there in the 60's.

It's refreshing they are using something people aren't used to seeing and amazing the description of the size of the roses.

In Iowa it's crown vetch. I wish we could get with it and have some nice roses, but they must have cost the state a bundle. I suppose they got a deal for buying in quantity.

Good luck in your quest. Just don't put one like that white one in your yard unless you have a very big one :-).

I think most of the ones around here are the Meidiland groundcover roses (Pink Meidiland, etc.). I've seen the Banksia roses (both white & yellow, as well as fortuniana) in Fresno along every highway, where they've done some beautiful plantings of trees, shrubs, roses, wildflowers, etc. Up here in Spring there are several Petaluma exits planted with assortments of Daffodils, first time I've seen a municipal planting of them in wilder areas, yet they come back a little better every year. I used to get annoyed in Texas because they'd seed out the wildflowers, and then mow them down just as they finish blooming, or close to it, but not with enough time for the seed to ripen.

--Ron